starmada4546

[starmada4546]

The Derailing Trump Train

This essay is by-and-large for people like me who regularly have to deal with conservative family members or coworkers or whatever godawful thing makes you have to put up with these kinds of people. If that's not you, the advice in this one probably isn't going to be very helpful, but you're welcome to stick around for the analysis, if you like.

As the veneer of moderate, respectable conservatism slips away, people are going to start getting their buyers remorse. I've already heard people discussing how they aren't fond of Trump's policy on Ukraine, or his tariffs, or how Elon Musk is slashing federal jobs and giving himself multibillion dollar contracts. Its... highly frustrating to say the least. When I hear a very conservative uncle talking about how Trump's promised tax cuts don't include him, it makes me want to scream "How the fuck can you possibly be so selfish?! You people have had almost a decade to realize this man is a serious contender for Worst Human Alive and the only time you can start caring is when it impacts you?!"It really hurts to see a man who has spent the last decade fanning the flames of fascism, destroying lives, spreading bigotry, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, only lose his supporters after he starts hurting them specifically.

For those unfamiliar, there's a meme on the internet that many people like to quote in these sorts of situations. It goes something like "'But I didn't think the leopards would eat my face!' sobs woman who voted for the leopards eating people's faces party."

Since the original incident that started this meme, Leopards Ate My Face has become a term that refers to conservatives who voted for a conservative politician who proceeded to do something to hurt them, usually because said conservative voter didn't bother to figure out what said politician actually stood for. It's a popular meme for good reason; it's cathartic to laugh at the comeuppance of others, right?

I generally speaking disagree. This sort of thing drives me absolutely up the wall. It's selfish people finally getting hurt by their own selfishness, but in a vast majority of cases, those selfish people still won't accept they were ever actually in the wrong. It's always that they were lied to, or that the circumstances changed, or some other bullshit excuse that serves the same rhetorical purpose: I can't possibly have been wrong, so something outside my control intervened. This is, of course, demonstrating a key feature of the conservative mindset, which is the fundamental lack of self accountability. If there was any acknowledgement that everything that was going to happen was well known in advance, that political scholars and economists and journalists were Screaming From The Fucking Rooftops that this was going to happen, they'd have to acknowledge that there were steps they could have taken to have not caused harm for themselves, because in the fundamental selfish narcissism of conservative thought, the only thing that is immutably morally wrong is anything that hurts me.

If there was any acknowledgement that they could have done five minutes of research to keep from committing the most egregious of moral sins, doing something against their own interests, they'd have to accept that they bear the responsibility for that. So it is always, always, someone else's fault. Any evidence they could have used is dismissed out of hand; the news stations are lying, the economists are profiteering hacks, and the political scholars are propagandists.

But go far enough down the train tracks, they start running out of people to blame. When they're far enough out from the election that the opinions and writings of the fourth estate don't matter to them anymore, the republicans control all three branches of government, and most of what vestiges of leftism still exist in the government are seemingly hellbent on being the most ineffectual, pathetic doormats in the history of opposition parties, the list from the center of the Venn Diagram of "People who I think have the power to screw me over" and "People who I hate," starts growing dangerously short for their cognitive dissonance. It may not often seem like it, but there is a limit to how far these people can stretch and distort their own reality.

This is where we see the step of most groups built on ideologies of hate, supremacy, and/or exploitation wherein the members of the group begin to turn on each other, or at the least to begin their own balkanization. Remember, the very last person they can blame for their woes is themselves. They will blame anyone and everyone else, including their Der Fuhrer before they go that far. If they start running out of people to blame, they find new ones.

(This also mirrors a key feature of fascism, where when an outgroup can no longer be reasonably blamed for the problems of a society due to their absence or lack of cultural relevance, and are replaced with new outgroups, thereby making the ingroup smaller and smaller, but I'm sure that's only a coincidence, wink wink nudge nudge.)

So, after analyzing the toxic narcissism inherent to this worldview, I'm gonna go ahead and proceed to light myself on fire with napalm by defending it.

Ok ok, I'm not actually going to defend it. But I am going to ask for it to be encouraged?

This behavior is absolutely fucking terrible, don't get me wrong, but it is also self destructive, at least as far as cohesive fascist movements go. When they start pointing the blame fingers at each other, that is the death knell for fascism. Fascism exists because it's an ideology of hate, but it proliferates because it doesn't market itself that way. It markets itself as a series of benefits for the average everyman, which are obtained through bigotry. When those benefits don't materialize, which they can't, because bigotry has never served anyone but those who already hold all the power, it creates resentment and distrust. This is usually where the fascists point at something else and say "Look, a minority!" but that strategy only works for so long before it becomes put-up or shut-up.

So believe me, when that conservative uncle complains about Trump's tax cuts and you just want to go ballistic, I understand that sucks. But I urge you, smile and nod. It's a low bar at this point, but he's taking a second to think about it. Maybe it isn't going to get him to take his head out of the Kool-Aid fountain, but resentment and distrust don't start a violent boil overnight. In fact, we don't need a violent boil. We don't necessarily need for these people to start voting for democrats, we just need them to decide they'd rather not bother heading to the polls on election day. A small simmer is enough.

Because eventually, when Trump strips enough of the iron off of the track, the train derails.

In the wise and seemingly eternal words of Sun Tzu, "Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake."

[starmada4546]

It's Not Over Yet

Shorter post this time, but I want to emphasize, because my recent essays have been admittedly quite negative and defeatist.

This is not over. It will never be over as long as there is anyone left to fight for it. People have been fighting tyranny for as long as tyranny has been around.

It will be difficult. It will be full of struggle. It will require courage, resolve, and self sacrifice. I cannot promise it will not require blood. I Do Not Advocate For Political Violence, but at this point violence is being and will continue to be forced on us, and it is not our fault if it comes to the point when we must defend ourselves.

That being said, it is important we do not lose sight of who we are. We do not stoop to their level. Unethical behavior is the tool of the enemy; we do not need it, we will not use it. We will not become them to stop them. These election results are fair, like it or not. We lost, and we must fight back with all the power we have left to make sure we can claw our way back to normalcy.

This is not normal. This cannot be normal. We will not let this be normal.

Thank you, and stay safe.

[starmada4546]

Well, in the hours since posting this and it's subsequent migration to reddit, I've gotten some pretty decent responses, (And a lot of people who clearly just didn't read anything I wrote, but some good!), so I'm going to go over some of my points again for the people dozing in the back of the class.

Yes, as of writing this, over 72 million Americans voted for Trump. All of them are ignorant, shortsighted, and selfish at best, and bigoted, traitorous, and just straight up evil at worst. Without those votes, no matter how badly the democratic party screwed the pooch, Trump would not have won. I do not say this to excuse those people. All of those people should be held accountable for their behavior. However, as cynical of an assumption as it may be, one can no longer view American politics through the lens of all the voters trying to elect the candidate that's the best for everyone. Such a lens is an outdated relic of an era in which the evils of politics were done behind smiling masks, and the oppression was done behind closed doors instead of at the top of every media headline in the nation. If there is one thing that this election has made crystal clear, it is that Americans have become more concerned with their own wallets and kitchen tables than with the lives of their neighbors. The problem is that even through that framing, the Democratic party should easily sweep any logical voter, and yet they didn't. Progressivism and class consciousness is the answer to economic anxiety, and yet it was completely ignored by the democrats in this election, and the price for that is what we're seeing now, because the Democrats allowed themselves to be made into the establishment, and allowed the republicans to sell themselves as anti-establishment, regardless of the fact that both are the establishment, and neither wishes to be against the establishment, merely to mold it to their liking.

The fact of the matter is, no matter how evil Trump is, he will always have support. That is his brand. He has famously self-proclaimed that he could commit murder in broad daylight and not lose a single vote, and if there is one thing Trump has ever been correct about, it's that. The Democrats must, must count on the Alt-Right turning up to vote in force for the conservative candidate, and from the numbers they've been doing, the Democrats can't rely on the moderate vote to carry them through that. Hell, it doesn't seem like the Democrats can rely on the moderate vote at all. The DNC has no further right to drift, and yet they keep trying anyway, dropping their supporters from the left to be subsumed by the right, because deep down, they are not aligned with the left. This does not necessarily apply to every registered Democrat everywhere, but the party as a whole has historically only taken up progressive causes when they either see an opportunity to claim moral victory over conservatives. They do not truly care for progressivism, or at least they haven't for many years. They put up a black woman for president and say, "See? Our candidate is two minorities in one! Isn't this what you care about?" No! I'd love to have a black woman in the white house as much as anyone else, but the democrats have fallen so out of touch that I must believe that they genuinely think that "diverse" candidates is enough to guarantee a progressive vote. They saw Obama win two consecutive terms and chalked it up to his skin color, which is absolutely it's own form of racism, by the way. They tried to test this hypothesis in 2016 in Hilary Clinton, another historically unlikable candidate, with no real progressive policy and all her messaging being about her gender and not particularly her competence of fitness for office, while simultaneously dicking over the largest progressive movement in recent history, and they got burned. And the lesson they took from this? It wasn't making sure their candidate reflects the voters wishes, it wasn't learning to message on policy and confidence as I discussed earlier, and it certainly wasn't to not alienate progressive voters. It was "We didn't reach the moderate conservative enough. Clearly, we just didn't reach the moderate wing of the republican party like we should have. Obviously, we must have won the progressive vote, so the problem lies in the center."

It's not merely the entitlement they feel to the progressive vote, it's the fact that they can't conceive of the fact that they didn't get it. Even the moderate wing of the conservative party was never going to vote for a woman, much less a black woman. Meanwhile, there were millions of votes the democrats were counting on, and yet they didn't receive, because they didn't bother actually trying to get them! They felt entitled to the progressive vote. They felt entitled to the black vote. They felt entitled to the queer vote, the Hispanic vote, the female vote, the Arab vote, the sheer entitlement in this party is sickening. The fact of the matter is that they simply can't conceive of a world in which the white moderate does not decide who sits in the Oval Office, and fundamentally, they are against any attempt to change that, because the world in which the white moderate is the deciding vote is the world in which they keep their power. The world wherein the white moderate is the deciding vote is the world wherein they must confront none of their inner biases, because if they are not receiving the votes they feel entitled to, then they must be wrong on a fundamental level. That world is comfortable and familiar to them, it plays by the rules they expect and like, it requires no reexamination, reflection, or introspection. Any acknowledgement that progressives, or POC, or the LGBT+ community are voting blocks that could win them elections if focused on is an acknowledgement that the white moderate is only the deciding vote in the tenuous world order they have constructed, and any attempt to convince Democrats that they need to enfranchise these groups, break up gerrymandered districts, or just Actually Put Some Fucking Effort Into Anyone Else is doomed to failure because of it.

Getting back to the point, yes, the fact that 72 million Americans voted for Donald J. Trump is a disgrace, and every single one of them should be held accountable for the blood that is about to be spilled. But at the end of the day, this is a trolley problem. The Democrats had the ability to avert the trolley, and they fucked that up spectacularly. The man who tied the people to the tracks and set the trolley to run over them is a monster, but his actions are counted upon either way, and so too are Trump's. This debate isn't about the ethics of Alt-Right conservatism. If you've made it this far into this essay, I can reasonably assume you already agree with me that it holds no moral merit worth consideration. It is about the fact that the Democratic party allowed this to happen, and must be held accountable for their actions. Going along with "Vote Blue No Matter Who!" is not a strategy that works. Progressives cannot call upon the party loyalty that conservatives have, in part because progressivism requires the brainpower to analyze the issues and discover the problems, while conservatives typically wait for a strongman to point at something for them to get angry at, but mostly in truth because the Democrats have not delivered like the Republicans have.

Sure, the Republicans don't deliver on a good economy, or fixing the issues they claim to care about, but what they do deliver on is what they stake their campaigns on, and it's bigotry. Say what you will, but when a conservative votes for Trump, they can be confident that Trump will continue to be racist, sexist, and anti-LGBT while in office, and he will make policy accordingly. He will lock migrant children in cages and appoint justices to overturn Roe v. Wade and tear gas progressive protesters. Those are things he said he was going to do whether directly or euphemistically, and he delivered.

Democrats say they will pack the court, and they don't. They say they will codify abortion, and by and large they don't. They talk about a $15 an hour minimum wage, they talk about Medicare and student debt relief and while some of these things have gotten done on a state by state basis, or gained a little ground here and there, walking out of a Democratic presidency, we have the same supreme court, the same minimum wage, arguably worse medical care, and only a sliver of the required student debt relief. I understand that the Biden administration has been fighting rabid obstructionists every step of the way, but at the end of the day, Trump was fighting obstruction during his presidency as well, and yet he still damaged the country to it's core, and now he has free reign of all three branches of government. After being ignored, abused, and seeing almost none of their policy passed, how could a progressive genuinely support the democrats on any systemic level? I got in the dirt to support Harris, and I do genuinely think not voting was a morally reprehensible thing for this election, because progressives should be fighting fascism more than we should care about our honor, but I can at least say I understand.

I can't do solutions yet. Maybe eventually, but right now I'm not sure there is any form of solution. The Democrats have proven themselves historically unable to learn the lessons of failure, and the Fascists have complete control of the government. Pretty much the only solution I can think of at this point is "Hope the democrats are still around in four years, hope our elections are fair enough for them to matter, and hope that maybe, finally this lesson has sunk in, but that's a lot of maybes for a country that we can only imagine right now. There's a lot of ground to lose, and nothing to defend it.

I do want to say this, though, since somebody commented on it to me. I wasn't kidding about the gun thing. If there's any irony to be had here, gun rights will likely be protected for the foreseeable future, because the gun lobby is here to stay, apparently. After Biden's term is up, I would not expect the already limited protections Leftists have had from law enforcement to apply at all. It's unfortunate, (And I Am Definitely Not Advocating For Political Violence Do Not Mistake Me,) but the only protection we are likely to have for the future is ourselves and each other. If you can feel comfortable owning and carrying a firearm, (and there is no shame if you can't) I would highly suggest learning to do so if at all possible. Hate crimes tend not to happen when the Nazis think that their targets can defend themselves; fascists are not known for courage. Even if you never have to use it, and I hope and pray to god nobody does, the fact that they know it's a possibility may save lives in and of itself. Even if you can't do that, I highly suggest something, be it pepper spray, a taser, or a blade, especially if you are a woman. I'd expect to see an increase in physical assaults and rapes over the next couple of years, and if I can protect anyone with my advice, I feel I am obligated to.

Kamala Harris deserved to lose.

That’s a controversial statement, so let me get something out of the way right out the gate: I am not a Trump supporter. I fucking hate Trump’s racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, fascist guts, and I will until the day I die. I voted for Harris, I volunteered for her campaign and several other local campaigns in my area. I did everything a politically active person should do to participate in our democracy.

And yet I, and anyone who was paying attention knew how this election was going to go ahead of time, for one very simple reason. What were Kamala Harris’s policy positions? What did she actually run on? What did she say she was going to do differently? Building a million homes for working-class people who have had their salaries so undercutted by inflation and price hikes that they can no longer afford the kind of long term saving required for that? Increase child tax credits when grocery prices are so high that nobody can afford another mouth to feed? Raising taxes on billionaires? She’s the Vice President of the current administration, why are they not already being taxed? And furthermore, where is that tax money going? Clearly not Medicare for All, or Student Debt Relief, or anything that could actually constitute benefits for the average citizen.

Discussing which demographics are “responsible” for electing Trump is a fucking stupid discussion, and anyone engaging in it should feel absolutely fucking ashamed at buying into more crap that the oligarchs put up to divide us. Except for a few exceptions, the demographics were coin-flip toss ups. What happened was that Kamala Harris lost 15 million votes. Not to Trump, but to apathy. Trump got 3 million less votes than he did in 2020, and still won, because people didn’t vote for Harris. The battle was in voter turnout, like we always knew it would be, and the Democratic Party lost it. Why?

Because Kamala Harris ran, like Biden did, on being the anti-Trump. And regardless of whether or not you think that the Democrats are responsible for current woes, (and I do not,) that's not a winning strategy when the "Anti-Trump" is the one in power. Being the Anti-Trump isn't a policy position. It's not a solution to anyone's issues. It's merely a hope that people think Trump is worse, and as we've seen, regardless of whether or not it should, that does not win elections. When gas prices or grocery bills are so expensive people can barely afford to survive, saying "Well, those will be worse under Trump," is not a solution. It does not provide confidence that she has plans to fix the issues. It is a shrug of the shoulders, and a dismissal, and that's why so many people stayed home.

In 2020, when the problems could be blamed on Trump without any sort of understanding of the complex issues that caused the problems, because Trump was simply the one in power and The President's Job Is To Fix Everything, so being Anti-Trump worked. When Democrats have been in the white house for four years, and people feel like the problems still aren't fixed, they lose confidence that the democrats will fix the problem, so they don't vote.

When food prices are spiking, you don't say, "The other guy will make it worse," because that's what any candidate would say, and it's not particularly different than just purely mudslinging, and its a claim that Trump will deny vehemently, so you can't win that argument. What you need to say is "I'll subsidize agriculture," or, "I'll increase the accessibility and power of food assistance programs." Regardless of whether or not those things would actually work, what they are is some kind of solid plan to actually fix the fucking problem. It's said that people don't vote on policy, and that's true a lot of the time, or at least more than it should be, but people do vote on confidence, and having policy of any kind builds that confidence. Regardless of what you think of Trump, the man has plenty of plans to implement policy. It's terrible, awful, nation destroying policy, but that's getting into the details and the facts, and that's where the voters' eyes glaze over and they stop listening to you. The fact that Trump has plans to change the status quo and Harris does not is how she lost this election.

When the status quo is untenable, people will vote for whatever breaks it, and that wasn't Harris.

It also doesn't help that Harris has pretty much refused to significantly differentiate herself from Joe Biden, who has plenty of his own problems, and again, is the status quo. Joe Biden refused to step aside and relegate himself to being a single term president because of his personal pride, and the Democrats absolutely refused to consider not backing him until he was forced to step aside when his problematic degradation was put on full display for the entire country to see and mock. Then, instead of holding an actual primary, where voters could choose who they wanted to see on the Democratic ticket, they decided to simply coronate Kamala Harris, a historically unpopular candidate with historically low approval ratings, and force anyone who was against Trump to rally behind a candidate they didn't choose and statistically speaking don't like. Is it any wonder that her ticket hemorrhaged 15 million votes from 2020? That's before getting into her incredibly strange choices during her campaign, from again having essentially no policy positions, to picking a Tim Walz, who while being imo a good person, is from an entirely blue state and not a swing state, and has neither experience running against serious mainline GOP candidates, nor any real nationwide appeal beyond his personality, and we've already established that vibes don't turn out voters.

Kamala Harris, and on a larger scale the Democratic Party, deserved to lose this election because they have almost entirely abandoned any sense of being the progressive option. They've completely abandoned the progressive wing of their party, because who else are they going to vote for? Trump?

I don't like being the guy who says, "Harris hasn't earned the votes," because if you didn't vote, fuck you, you're nearly as culpable in this as the MAGAts, but is it any wonder why progressives are abandoning the democrats? After being ignored, fucked over time after time for nearly a decade at this point, literally screaming and begging for people to care about genocide, fascism, and the literal end of the world and getting a pat on the head and a vote sticker, what the fuck else did anyone expect? Harris cozied up with Liz Cheney and tried to court the votes of a few thousand moderate republicans, while tens of millions of progressive votes were expected, and then you're all trying to to blame them when those votes don't come? Shame, shame on you, ye moderate democrats who'd rather get into bed with the center-right than any kind of progressive, you get what you fucking deserve.

Normally, I'd laugh at establishment democrats fucking around and finding out, but this time, it's not just them finding out, it's the whole of America finding out with them. I don't really have any advice, because I'm just as shattered as anyone else. Hunker down, spend time with your loved ones, and maybe learn how to use a gun in case some neo-nazi decides to try to hate-crime you. I'm hoping that the Democrats learn their lessons from this, but honestly at this point, I'm not sure they're capable of learning, if there'll even be a democratic party to speak of come 2028. Right now, I'm gonna go stare at the election results and feel my faith in humanity crack a little bit more.

[starmada4546]

Kamala Harris deserved to lose.

That’s a controversial statement, so let me get something out of the way right out the gate: I am not a Trump supporter. I fucking hate Trump’s racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, fascist guts, and I will until the day I die. I voted for Harris, I volunteered for her campaign and several other local campaigns in my area. I did everything a politically active person should do to participate in our democracy.

And yet I, and anyone who was paying attention knew how this election was going to go ahead of time, for one very simple reason. What were Kamala Harris’s policy positions? What did she actually run on? What did she say she was going to do differently? Building a million homes for working-class people who have had their salaries so undercutted by inflation and price hikes that they can no longer afford the kind of long term saving required for that? Increase child tax credits when grocery prices are so high that nobody can afford another mouth to feed? Raising taxes on billionaires? She’s the Vice President of the current administration, why are they not already being taxed? And furthermore, where is that tax money going? Clearly not Medicare for All, or Student Debt Relief, or anything that could actually constitute benefits for the average citizen.

Discussing which demographics are “responsible” for electing Trump is a fucking stupid discussion, and anyone engaging in it should feel absolutely fucking ashamed at buying into more crap that the oligarchs put up to divide us. Except for a few exceptions, the demographics were coin-flip toss ups. What happened was that Kamala Harris lost 15 million votes. Not to Trump, but to apathy. Trump got 3 million less votes than he did in 2020, and still won, because people didn’t vote for Harris. The battle was in voter turnout, like we always knew it would be, and the Democratic Party lost it. Why?

Because Kamala Harris ran, like Biden did, on being the anti-Trump. And regardless of whether or not you think that the Democrats are responsible for current woes, (and I do not,) that's not a winning strategy when the "Anti-Trump" is the one in power. Being the Anti-Trump isn't a policy position. It's not a solution to anyone's issues. It's merely a hope that people think Trump is worse, and as we've seen, regardless of whether or not it should, that does not win elections. When gas prices or grocery bills are so expensive people can barely afford to survive, saying "Well, those will be worse under Trump," is not a solution. It does not provide confidence that she has plans to fix the issues. It is a shrug of the shoulders, and a dismissal, and that's why so many people stayed home.

In 2020, when the problems could be blamed on Trump without any sort of understanding of the complex issues that caused the problems, because Trump was simply the one in power and The President's Job Is To Fix Everything, so being Anti-Trump worked. When Democrats have been in the white house for four years, and people feel like the problems still aren't fixed, they lose confidence that the democrats will fix the problem, so they don't vote.

When food prices are spiking, you don't say, "The other guy will make it worse," because that's what any candidate would say, and it's not particularly different than just purely mudslinging, and its a claim that Trump will deny vehemently, so you can't win that argument. What you need to say is "I'll subsidize agriculture," or, "I'll increase the accessibility and power of food assistance programs." Regardless of whether or not those things would actually work, what they are is some kind of solid plan to actually fix the fucking problem. It's said that people don't vote on policy, and that's true a lot of the time, or at least more than it should be, but people do vote on confidence, and having policy of any kind builds that confidence. Regardless of what you think of Trump, the man has plenty of plans to implement policy. It's terrible, awful, nation destroying policy, but that's getting into the details and the facts, and that's where the voters' eyes glaze over and they stop listening to you. The fact that Trump has plans to change the status quo and Harris does not is how she lost this election.

When the status quo is untenable, people will vote for whatever breaks it, and that wasn't Harris.

It also doesn't help that Harris has pretty much refused to significantly differentiate herself from Joe Biden, who has plenty of his own problems, and again, is the status quo. Joe Biden refused to step aside and relegate himself to being a single term president because of his personal pride, and the Democrats absolutely refused to consider not backing him until he was forced to step aside when his problematic degradation was put on full display for the entire country to see and mock. Then, instead of holding an actual primary, where voters could choose who they wanted to see on the Democratic ticket, they decided to simply coronate Kamala Harris, a historically unpopular candidate with historically low approval ratings, and force anyone who was against Trump to rally behind a candidate they didn't choose and statistically speaking don't like. Is it any wonder that her ticket hemorrhaged 15 million votes from 2020? That's before getting into her incredibly strange choices during her campaign, from again having essentially no policy positions, to picking a Tim Walz, who while being imo a good person, is from an entirely blue state and not a swing state, and has neither experience running against serious mainline GOP candidates, nor any real nationwide appeal beyond his personality, and we've already established that vibes don't turn out voters.

Kamala Harris, and on a larger scale the Democratic Party, deserved to lose this election because they have almost entirely abandoned any sense of being the progressive option. They've completely abandoned the progressive wing of their party, because who else are they going to vote for? Trump?

I don't like being the guy who says, "Harris hasn't earned the votes," because if you didn't vote, fuck you, you're nearly as culpable in this as the MAGAts, but is it any wonder why progressives are abandoning the democrats? After being ignored, fucked over time after time for nearly a decade at this point, literally screaming and begging for people to care about genocide, fascism, and the literal end of the world and getting a pat on the head and a vote sticker, what the fuck else did anyone expect? Harris cozied up with Liz Cheney and tried to court the votes of a few thousand moderate republicans, while tens of millions of progressive votes were expected, and then you're all trying to to blame them when those votes don't come? Shame, shame on you, ye moderate democrats who'd rather get into bed with the center-right than any kind of progressive, you get what you fucking deserve.

Normally, I'd laugh at establishment democrats fucking around and finding out, but this time, it's not just them finding out, it's the whole of America finding out with them. I don't really have any advice, because I'm just as shattered as anyone else. Hunker down, spend time with your loved ones, and maybe learn how to use a gun in case some neo-nazi decides to try to hate-crime you. I'm hoping that the Democrats learn their lessons from this, but honestly at this point, I'm not sure they're capable of learning, if there'll even be a democratic party to speak of come 2028. Right now, I'm gonna go stare at the election results and feel my faith in humanity crack a little bit more.

[starmada4546]

The universe was intelligently designed? Nah, fuck that. The universe was unintelligently designed. A high school senior made the universe for his science project but he left it in the fridge too long and now there is mold growing on it.